This sermon was snowed out… maybe for the best!For the last two weeks, our Advent bible study group has been looking at the stories of miracle babies in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament. We have asked ourselves again and again, what do these stories tell us about the Israelite faith? About the faith that Jesus lived? About the faith of Jesus’ followers? If we are going to call ourselves disciples of Jesus, and I can think of no better title, then we had better all ask these questions, ask them again and again… or maybe I’m wrong. If you have it worked out, if you understand what Jesus meant and means, if you understand God’s will, if you can pick up that pew Bible and read a consistent and coherent message, please raise your hand.
No takers? I’m not surprised. You might be here in a UCC congregation because you were born in this tradition, either the UCC or one of its antecedents. But many of us are here as refugees. We couldn’t make sense of our own traditions, could not find the same meaning in that book as those around us. We could find prosperity theology in some portions of the Hebrew scriptures, but we could not find it in the prophets, in the teachings of Jesus, not even in the teachings of Paul. We were told to have a personal relationship with Jesus, a relationship of righteousness grounded in faith that would guarantee immortality, we were told that Jesus came to cleanse us from the stain placed on us by a treacherous woman, a weak lesser human who had succumbed to supernatural temptation. We were told that personal morality and some abstract concept of faith was all that mattered, that Christians must fight abortion rights and homosexual rights.
Many were raised in a pick and choose Christianity that used Jesus as a weapon, that freely mixed passages to justify the dark desires of the human heart, the fear of strangers, self-righteousness, legalism, greed… though these were in fact exactly the topics about which Jesus preached, he spoke of the evils of self-righteousness, of legalism, of greed, not about sexual conduct. The record of the teachings of Jesus and the stories of the first Christians are often combined with selected passages of the Scripture of Jesus, that is the Hebrew Scripture, and twisted to make a monster of the gospel. Good news? I think not! And like so many others, I fled from that empty faith that contained nothing of Jesus. I was a refugee seeking a home… and I found one in the United Church of Christ.
You might be thinking, now wait a cotton-picking minute there, Gary. It’s Advent, it’s Incarnation and obedience to God, and its joy and family, and it’s not time to go off ranting about the evils of the fundamentalist heresy. And I’m going to answer that it is Advent, that the question is, the advent of what? What is arriving, beginning? What are we celebrating? Is it a happy tale with a couple of twists like the no vacancy sign, but one that ends with a tableau of Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, some kings and shepherds, a little drummer boy, and a shining star? Or is it a tale of a child born into a poor family in the backwards colony of a great and brutal empire? Is it the shepherds and the obedient Mary of Luke? Or the slaughter of the innocents, the homage of earthly kings, and the obedient Joseph of Matthew? Why does the author of Mark, the first gospel written, feel no need to tell the story of Jesus’ birth? What is so important to Matthew and Luke, that doesn’t matter Mark, that they had to expand their gospels, both of which use Mark as a source? Why are Matthew and Luke so different? What are they trying to tell us about Immanuel, about God with Us?
Advent of what? Not of the personal Jesus uber-morality immortality of the Christian conservatives! Jesus was born in a country not at all unlike today’s Iraq. Constant violence, competing factions of what was the same religion. An occupation army that viewed itself as superior, that did not mind using torture and execution to get its way. We have twisted this story into a bucolic narrative complete with lambs and kittens. It’s not a pretty story!
Our gospel reading speaks of God’s power to reverse the human order. Luke tells us that the hungry get to eat, that the rich are thrown down, go away hungry. Tell me how that’s supposed to work with a pledge campaign!
The gospels record two messages delivered in one package. Message one is be good, treat one another well, love God. It is the message of faith and personal conduct. Message two is this: change the world. Do something now! Everything you think you know about God and how the world works is wrong. God wants something better for you, God wants something better from you. Comfortable? Don’t be. Jesus tells us to abandon our families, give up our possessions, to go out and act, to, as the prophet Micah tells us, do justice and walk humbly with our God. And the package is this- the kingdom of God is at hand.
Not the kingdom of heaven, as the author of Matthew writes. The kingdom of God. Not some unknown then… now, right here, right now. As we build our own kingdoms day in and day out, walling out the things that scare us, that challenge us, God is there to break it down. Not your kingdom, God says. My kingdom. A kingdom of radical amazing selfless love… a love so strong that it can survive the most brutal conditions, the most brutal death. God is calling us again and again to live into the kingdom of God. And the reason we need to celebrate it every year is that it is breaking in all of the time. The kingdom of God, the kingdom of love, is dynamic, is kicking the legs out from under our own petty kingdoms and daring us to soar. This is what Jesus means when he tells us again and again that the Kingdom of God is at hand, has come near to you, that you will not taste God before you enter the kingdom of God. The kingdom is now and never, in time and timeless. It is today and it was yesterday, and it will break through tomorrow. It will break through again with the next season of Advent, and the Holy Spirit will quicken our hearts, the stories will be told, and if we listen, if we study, if we pray, we might just hear the call of the kingdom!
Now, I’ve been going on quite a bit about a kingdom, and some might question the language, might wonder if such a term still makes sense, after all we are a democracy, we threw off the yoke of kings. And king, that’s a masculine word, surely I’m not endorsing just one more patriarchy. And the fact is, I’m not. I’m using the language adopted by the first followers of Jesus. The titles Son of God, King, Savior, these were titles for Augustus, and by extension for the succeeding emperors. To declare faith in Jesus was an act of subversion, it was high treason. There’s the edge we need! Jesus was brutally tortured and executed by an occupation army, he was an enemy combatant. Are we happy now that we are the empire?
Advent of what? What are we preparing for? For God with us? Yes! For the Kingdom of God? Yes! For the moral courage to live beyond ourselves, to stretch and to grow and to leave what is comfortable for what is brave and courageous and of God and just? Yes, I tell you, with grace and together, yes! We can re-claim Jesus from those who would turn him into a Victorian prude. The British had a wonderful ad campaign for the Easter season a few years ago. Jesus was depicted Che Guevarra style, and underneath were four words. Meek. Mild. As if.
The ad campaign got it right. Jesus the subversive is asking you to forget everything you think you know, is daring you. I’m daring you. Life in full is a life lived into the kingdom, is a life that straddles both worlds. I’m standing on the edge of everything I’ve never been before .
Years ago I stood in a small house just north of Bluefields, Nicaragua. The walls were bullet ridden. The elderly woman described hiding in the cistern as the US-funded contras tortured and killed her husband. This was a land that had suffered incredible cruelty. Under the dictatorship, when they wanted information from you, they would take your entire family up in a helicopter. And then they would throw them out of the helicopter one by one until you confessed or divulged, until they got their way. And here sat this woman in her tiny bullet-ridden house, free of the Somoza regime a few short years before we Americans waged a proxy war against them, and she looked at us with eyes full of love and said “I have hope.†I have hope. I have hope that we can reclaim our scriptures from those that do evil in God’s name. I have hope that we can stand on that edge of everything we have never been before, and that we can have the courage to dive over, to be in the world but not of the world. I have hope! And I have faith. I have faith that this Sunday, this year, this blizzardy gross morning, is the Advent of the Kingdom of God. May it always be so! Amen.